Don't Waste Your Time Playing the Blame Game: Who Loses When You Do? The Customer, of Course

Is it just me, or do the statements from the NFL owners and players sound like a couple of little boys blaming each other for breaking Dad's favorite La-Z-Boy by jumping up and down on it?

Looking back on my boyhood, I think my younger brother and I tried our hands at the blame game once or twice and then gave it up when our parents instantly demonstrated the futility of playing it. When I say we gave it up, I mean we gave up the finger-pointing, “He did it!” version. We got more sophisticated and tried to imply that the other sibling had gone over to the dark side and done an evil deed.

By the way, the sophisticated version of the blame game never worked either.

“Blah, blah, blah. We know none of that is really true. . . . [It's] just spin and trying to keep the upper hand in the public relations battle. And the blame game is beyond tiresome at this point. . . . Even if both sides kept blabbering on about how bad they feel for NFL fans, and how much they only desire to protect the future of the game.”

What's happened here is that the owners and players are basically saying: “We don't give a damn about our customers (the fans).” How can they get away with that? Can you imagine running your business that way?

Remember, an athletic event is a product that is consumed as it's produced, almost like sushi or Starbuck's coffee. Now, unlike those perishables, sports can be recycled through highlight films and cable TV, but those are after-market products that are useless without the live events. So if the owners and players are fighting and not producing live games, who's getting dumped on? The customer, of course.

Can you imagine ceasing to produce – and more importantly ceasing to sell to your customers – your product? Of course not. Especially for what may be months, or even an entire season's worth of sales. If the folks at Microsoft suddenly went nuts in a dispute between management and software programmers and all software sales stopped abruptly, and stayed stopped for months, do you think they'd stay in business? Even if both management and programmers uttered all kinds of baloney that translated as “He did it!” Not likely, since Oracle offers Open Office (for free!), and Linux is a stable operating system supported by all kinds of folks. Mozilla offers free versions of a web browser (Firefox) and e-mail client (Thunderbird) for free. With all that competition out there, it's hard to believe that if Microsoft stopped all production for, let's say, 6 months, it would survive.

But the NFL doesn't have that problem. It can afford to ignore the desires of its customers because, if you'll pardon the expression, it is the only game in town. Both the NFL owners and players are behaving like the Lily Tomlin character Ernestine, a nasty telephone operator, who liked to tell telephone customers, “We don't care, we don't have to...we're the phone company.” History supports this position. Every time there's been a major stoppage in one of America's professional sports, the fans eventually come back. Most of the time, the stopped sport goes on to greater and greater revenues.

So, if alienating the customers isn't a good reason to avoid this kind of machismo-measuring showdown, what is?

The lost revenues from all the unplayed games that can never be recouped? The drop in merchandising sales? Or, to return to a constant theme of mine, maybe the reason should be: It's the right thing to do.

As the commanding general of the Allies in Europe during World War II, Ike never forgot that his mission was to beat the Germans as quickly as possible with the lowest loss of life possible. He was convinced that the Normandy invasion was the surest route to accomplish his mission, and he forthrightly told everyone that. Including FDR, when the president ordered him to invade North Africa instead of France in 1942. He told the same thing to Winston Churchill, who intensely disliked the plan to invade France until a month before D-Day.

Ike stayed focused on his mission and was honest about it every day of the war. If the NFL owners and players did the same thing, maybe they'd settle this thing in a hurry. That's unlikely, but it doesn't mean that as you face your own management challenges you shouldn't follow Ike instead of the NFL. After all, how does scoring a touchdown compare to winning a war?